City of Cupertino has a lot riding on Apple and its spaceship campus

CUPERTINO, Calif. - Leaders of this Silicon Valley city firmly tied their fate to Apple when they blessed plans for a grand spaceship-themed campus. Now comes the tricky part: living with it.

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Leaders of this Silicon Valley city firmly tied their fate to Apple when they blessed plans for a grand spaceship-themed campus. Now comes the tricky part: living with it.

The hotly anticipated construction project gives Cupertino an iconic building and cements its relationship with the world’s most valuable company. It also promises to inject Cupertino with thousands more high-tech workers, intensifying traffic, and links the city’s future even more closely to that of the company and its fortunes in the turbulent tech industry.

Cupertino, which has about 60,000 residents, faces a problem shared with other cities in the San Francisco Bay area, such as Richmond with a Chevron refinery, Berkeley with the University of California, Palo Alto with Stanford University and Mountain View with Google. Although the cities appreciate having a cadre of well-paid workers, they risk becoming too dependent on giant employers whose fortunes rise and fall. They also must answer to residents about the dark side of growth, which threatens to clog roads and wipe out local charm.

The mixed blessings of Apple’s expansion will be a top concern for Cupertino leaders as they amend the city’s general plan for the next decade or so. As construction on the spaceship races toward a 2016 completion date, city officials hope to use the process to ease Cupertino’s dependence on Apple ever so slightly.

City leaders are revisiting limits for commercial space and hotels, potentially making way for new businesses that could diversify the tax base. They say one secondary benefit of the new Apple campus has been increased interest in local business. Since approving Apple’s plans, the city has attracted a new developer for a struggling shopping mall and two developers of hotels.

And just as restaurants, bookstores and bars cluster around university campuses such as Berkeley and Stanford, small outlets probably will pop up to serve a hub such as Apple. But it’s still the core company that drives the activity, planners say.

“If you stick down a huge business that employs that many people in a relatively small town, that business is going to become the town,” said Stanford University economics professor Roger Noll. “There’s no way to avoid that.”

Apple occupies about 60 percent of Cupertino’s commercial real estate, said Angela Tsui, the city’s economic-development manager. The 16,000 employees in town are 40 percent of the job base, according to a 2013 economic-impact report that the company commissioned. Apple paid $9.2 million in taxes to Cupertino in 2012, providing 18 percent of the city’s budget.

Many cities would happily trade places with Cupertino, Noll said, noting that Apple provides a glut of highly educated, upwardly mobile professionals. In 2012, the 1,285 Apple employees living in Cupertino took home a collective $159.4 million in salary, or more than $124,000 per worker, according to the economic-impact report. In comparison, the median salary in Silicon Valley that year was $90,415, according to Joint Venture Silicon Valley.

But tech companies’ fortunes can turn quickly. Hewlett-Packard once maintained a large campus in Cupertino but left in 2012 after shrinking its workforce. Sobered by that, Cupertino leaders stressed the importance of diversifying the economic base in the city’s 2011 financial report.

That year, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs pitched the spaceship to the Cupertino City Council. The gleaming loop of glass he dreamed up for the site of HP’s old campus has been hailed as an architectural icon but could easily turn into a white elephant if the company’s business falters, Noll said.

“The same thing (that happened to HP) could happen to Apple,” he said, “in which case Cupertino is stuck with an empty flying saucer.”

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